Poet, fiction and non-fiction writer, curator, artist.
He is a contributing editor to the American literary annual Fulcrum and has edited issues of Landfall, Sport.
He has also worked with letterpress printers, visual artists, typographers, composers, musicians, film-makers and other artists exploring new possibilities for poetry.

1988 Frank Sargeson Fellow.

1995 Victoria University Writer in Residence.

1997 - 2004 Taught in the creative writing programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington.

2005
Guest writer at the Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, and travelled to Moscow for the launching of Land of Seas, an anthology of New Zealand poetry translated into Russian.

2006
O'Brien's poems were incorporated into a fashion range by leading New Zealand clothes designer Doris De Pont.

2008
Guest at ‘Les Belles Etrangeres’ festival, France, where, with Jenny Bornholdt, he read in Paris, Marseilles, Arles, Nantes and Lille. Later that month, he visited Berlin, with his partner Jenny Bornholdt, as a guest of the Goethe Institut.

2009
June - left his position as senior curator at City Gallery Wellington to work full-time on various writing and visual arts-related endeavours.
August - he was a featured writer at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

The pilgrim wet with tears
Searches his pocket for shelter
Crawls under a tiny handkerchief
And calls this place Home.
Somewhere deep in the sleeping face
A woman is running in a familiar gown
Chasing a fox away from the chickens –
On the manor wall generations later
A fox is carved hanging from a tree
Rabbits the size of men
Are being shot through with arrows
It is an untidy oracle but one worth noting –
This familiar tale, this sleeping face.

From: Location of the Least Person
by Gregory O’Brien. pg 64.
Published 1987 by Auckland University Press

EXHIBITIONS

Since 1990 has held Solo shows at Bowen Gallery, Wellington.
1990 – 1995 Solo and group exhibitions at RKS Art, Auckland.

• A Nest of Singing Birds—100 Years of the New Zealand School Journal - for National Library Gallery, Wellington, 2007 (co-curated with Susanna Andrew and Jenny Bornholdt) (toured to New Plymouth)
• Aberhart - for City Gallery Wellington, 2007 (toured to Auckland, Wanganui, Christchurch and Dunedin)
• Fiona Hall—Force Field - for Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and City Gallery Wellington (toured to Christchurch and, in reduced form, to New Plymouth and Newcastle, Australia) (co-curated with >Vivienne Webb, MCA, and Paula Savage)
• John Pule retrospective - for City Gallery Wellington (to open in June 2010)
• The imaginative life and times of Graham Percy - for Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland University, 2011. Touring show.

Where the alphabet begins-Janet Frame and contemporary New Zealand art, lecture given at City Gallery Wellington, 2005:
http://www.citygallery.org.nz/mainsite/lecture-by-gregory-o-brien.html

Introduction to Land of Seas, an anthology of New Zealand poetry translated into Russian and published in Moscow, June 2005. English version:
http://www.nzetc.org/iiml/turbine/Turbi05/nzpoetryabroad/landofseas1.html

Exit from Eden—euphoria and despair in the art of Fiona Hall, lecture given at Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth, May 2008:
www.govettbrewster.com [in preparation]

A book-length poem, ‘Malachi’, originally published by Little Esther Books, Adelaide, 1993:
http://www.eaf.asn.au/otis/gom.html

A 2008 long sequence of poems, ‘The ailing wife’, in the UK journal Shearsman:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/magazine/back_issues/shearsman77_78/obrien.html